+1 for asking the question. I know you were probably asking Christian and not me, and Christian’s answer is likely to be the more valuable one, but here’s my two cents:
My sense is that there is no other 5⁄6 … that what people claim to get is greater introspective access and greater sensations of relief or clarity or certainty, and that what I do provides me the same benefits.
If I were really reaching, I guess I’d imagine that genuine Focusing provides more of the benefits that meditation does? Increasing one’s ability to induce states, increasing one’s ability to deeply relax and clear one’s mind, that sort of thing?
I could also see the real version perhaps doing a better job at capturing nuance and subtlety around the edges. Like, following the predictive processing model, one might imagine that Focusing is about lowering the volume on the top-down predictive signals, so that more of the bottom-up perceptive signals can register and be heard. I suspect that the process I’m doing successfully avoids drowning out important bottom-up signals, but I wouldn’t be immediately dismissive of someone who claimed I was crystallizing things too soon or forcing things to fit into a premade box when they might actually be a slightly different shape.
Most of the times I’ve encountered people fretting about that sort of thing, I think they ended up overstating their case (it seems like they’re trading one failure mode for another, and are susceptible to overfitting and being oversensitive and convincing themselves that fleeting and unimportant signals are real and super relevant). But I maintain uncertainty about that, and certainly even if they’re too far along the spectrum I might nevertheless be at the wrong point myself.
+1 for asking the question. I know you were probably asking Christian and not me, and Christian’s answer is likely to be the more valuable one, but here’s my two cents:
My sense is that there is no other 5⁄6 … that what people claim to get is greater introspective access and greater sensations of relief or clarity or certainty, and that what I do provides me the same benefits.
If I were really reaching, I guess I’d imagine that genuine Focusing provides more of the benefits that meditation does? Increasing one’s ability to induce states, increasing one’s ability to deeply relax and clear one’s mind, that sort of thing?
I could also see the real version perhaps doing a better job at capturing nuance and subtlety around the edges. Like, following the predictive processing model, one might imagine that Focusing is about lowering the volume on the top-down predictive signals, so that more of the bottom-up perceptive signals can register and be heard. I suspect that the process I’m doing successfully avoids drowning out important bottom-up signals, but I wouldn’t be immediately dismissive of someone who claimed I was crystallizing things too soon or forcing things to fit into a premade box when they might actually be a slightly different shape.
Most of the times I’ve encountered people fretting about that sort of thing, I think they ended up overstating their case (it seems like they’re trading one failure mode for another, and are susceptible to overfitting and being oversensitive and convincing themselves that fleeting and unimportant signals are real and super relevant). But I maintain uncertainty about that, and certainly even if they’re too far along the spectrum I might nevertheless be at the wrong point myself.